NetApp gets up HP's nose, attacks EMC, which sneers at IBM while HDS picks a blogfight

by Simon Sharwood

The storage industry’s blog wars have escalated with HP’s Australian PR crew deciding that SearchStorage ANZ needs to know how mean and nasty NetApp is being to its LeftHand line of products, while HP, EMC and HDS indulge in the usual brawling.

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“…swinging at HP, whose LeftHand products it believes do not work entirely as advertised. HP’s Calvin Zito defends his company and curiously asks if anyone cares about the debates."

We replied that:

"We care, Calvin. We care an extra lot when one combatant is looking for a way out!”

It seems we were right to care, too, as we've since been approached by HP’s local PR outfit, Burson-Marsteller, pointing out the HP post we linked to above and offering to “discuss the Left Hand Networks technology in more detail” on the off-chance we think NetApp is right and LeftHand products are expensive doorstops (which we don’t, by the way).

We can only imagine that HP wants a little chat because it is worried NetApp has landed some telling blows. Whether they were low blows or not we’ll figure out soon, but in the meantime HP’s Zito’s still hard at work rebutting NetApp’s claims in this post and this one too.

NetApp has moved on and is hassling EMC this week. The reason? EMC has made its version of thin provisioning free for its V-Max and DMX4 products. NetApp takes issue with the word “free”, arguing that “there’s always free cheese in mouse traps.”

EMC, meanwhile, takes issue with IBM’s addition of thin provisioning to its DS8000, via “Storage Anarchist” Barry Burke, whose day job is running Symmetrix. Burke reckons the pricetag of $US69K for the technology is a bit rich. (FWIW, we think IBM’s blog post about the new products could be the dullest ever to hit the Net, but that’s another story …)

Post of the week goes to a new player, EMC consumer cloud backup division Mozy, which has cranked out this beauty about just how much data we are all making. We expect this one will soon be co-opted into just about every PowerPoint presentation we ever see about storage.